Four weekly editions make a month. Between July 23 and August 16 the tracker went free, Notion's new API model was adopted start to finish, the first sitewide season opened its doors. 343 changes shipped across the app and the site in 25 days, carried by 37 production deploys. Every week outbuilt the one before it.
The month, week by week
Changes merged per weekly edition. The trend is not an accident; the pace kept building.
What defined the month
Eight arcs, distilled from four weeks of shipping.
The tracker went free
The individual Pro tier was removed outright in early August. Competitions, duels, insights, streaks, freeze days: all of it is free now, with no trial period and no card. The pricing page, the template page, the guides, the FAQ all say so. A post on the blog explains the honest reason behind the decision.
Season 0: Founding Heroes opens September 1
The month closed with the app's first sitewide season. Season 0: Founding Heroes sits on the homepage now, visible without an account, open to every account, running through September. On the first scoring day every participant gets a starting-gun email. Whoever finishes a featured season earns a badge that stays on their account. Connect your tracker before September 1 to be there from the first day.
One month, one API migration
Notion is evolving its API toward a new data-source model. This month carried that migration from first contact to done: the integration first learned to speak both shapes, then the nightly sync's read path switched over, then the write paths followed, then every remaining call was unified onto one current API version. The overnight self-healing run grew up alongside it. It now recognizes a journal database sitting in Notion's trash, repairs stale database references where repair is possible, paces its requests per connection so one busy workspace cannot slow anybody else's night.
Duels grew up
Duels started the month as one-at-a-time, whole-account affairs. They ended it transformed. A duel can be fought over a single habit; you pick yours when you challenge, your opponent picks theirs on accepting. Up to three duels can run at once, with a card stack in the app plus a chip switcher in the widget. Cheering got canned messages, a nudge when your opponent missed a day, an email when someone cheers you on. Days off in a duel are capped so an average cannot be gamed by sitting in the tavern.
The widget carried the month
The embed inside Notion picked up something in every single week. A full demo mode that runs without an account, now powering the template page. A year-long habit heatmap, drawing on 400 days of kept history. Layout fixes for phones, for the awkward band between phone and tablet, for Notion's sandboxed mobile embed. A session that survives frame reloads. Freeze and undo buttons that ask the server what is actually possible before offering it.
Honest numbers, all month long
A steady drumbeat of scoring corrections ran through all four weeks. Freeze days settle as neither due nor missed, protect lifetime totals, land their credit in the week they belong to. Schedule edits keep streaks intact where the rhythm survives, reset totals cleanly where it does not. Ticking off yesterday's habit counts into weekly quotas. Weekly statistics are recomputed from the raw daily records, which lets corrections flow through history instead of freezing old mistakes in place. Removed habits keep their history too: re-add one later, its records come back, the gap counts for nothing on either side.
A new coat of arms
The product has a new mark: a knight. It fronts the site header, the favicon, the social preview cards, the cover art. The old mark served since the first prototype; the knight fits where the product actually went, with its seasons, duels, taverns and badges.
Foundations for the next month
The site jumped four major framework versions in one sitting, switched on strict type checking, gained a real unit-test runner. The server moved to the next major version of its framework, swapped its JSON engine for the current generation, got a proper connection pool. Every proposed change passes a full automated build before review; architecture rules are enforced by tests with zero grandfathered exceptions; a nightly end-to-end suite exercises the whole stack against a simulated Notion. Every mail carries a one-click unsubscribe. Analytics run self-hosted, cookieless, served from our own domain. Quiet security hardening shipped in several waves; the specifics stay unnamed on purpose.
Distilled from the four weekly ship-log editions covering July 23 to August 16, 2026. The weeks in full: July 26 · August 2 · August 9 · August 16.